Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Teaching Composition. Edited by T.R. Johnson and Shirley Morahan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. 73-101.
In this piece on the overall aims of composition, Bartholomae argues that, above all, we must enable our students to participate in the discourses of the academy. His chief interest lies in bringing students to share in the authority that the academic institution makes available; therefore, we must teach students to acquire those particular habits of mind that are the mark of that authority.
By the very title, Bartholomae means
The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. (74)
This necessarily involves an appropriation of a specialized discourse (74) and many students “try on” such discourse without the knowledge to make the discourse more than “a set of conventional rituals and gestures” (75). Bartholomae also calls this “a necessary and enabling fiction” (75). And, given the weight of such an act, there are times when student writers say “I don’t know,” it is not so much a case of having nothing to say as not being in a position to carry on a particular discussion (77). On other occasions, writers enter the discourse without a successful approximation (77).
Also present in this piece is some discussion of Linda Flower’s notions of “writer-based” and “reader-based” prose, and Bartholomae has this to say further: “Teaching students to revise for readers, then, will better prepare them to write initially with a reader in mind” (77). This pedagogy is still rather problematic, though, for students have to not only appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, but also appear comfortable with an imagined audience (78). Having the ability to not only imagine but also manipulate an audience allows one to write from “a position of privilege” (78). Bartholomae continues: “The problem of audience awareness, then, is a problem of power and finesse” (78-79).
Regarding the product vs. process aspect of writing, he states:
If writing is a process, it is also a product; and it is the product, and not the plan for writing, that locates a writer on the page, that locates him in a text and a style and the codes or conventions that make both of them readable. (80-81)
Furthermore,
…all writers, in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being ‘insiders’—that is, the privilege both of being inside an established and powerful discourse and of being granted a special right to speak. (81)
This imaginative state, however, can cause learning to become “more a matter of imitation or parody than a matter of invention and discovery” (82).
Bartholomae also stresses his understanding of knowledge as “situated in the discourse that constitutes ‘knowledge’ in a particular discourse community, rather than as situated in mental ‘knowledge sites’ (83). Necessarily, then, we might see two parts to teaching composition: learning to command certain codes unique to the discourse and learning to write/think as a writer (83).
Our beginning students need to learn…to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the ‘what might be said’ and constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic community. (84)
Furthermore, regarding basic writers, it would be better for us, as educators, to look at student writing “in the context of other student writing [so] we can better see the points of discord that arise when students try to write their way into the university” (85). It is this ability to imagine privilege, writes Bartholomae, which enables writing (90), but there’s more to it than that
The movement toward a more specialized discourse begins (or, perhaps, best begins) both when a student can define a position of privilege, a position that sets him against a ‘common’ discourse, and when he or she can work self-consciously, critically, against not only the ‘common’ code but his or her own. (92-93)
From this, Bartholomae goes on to explain ways students might establish their authority as writers (94-95) and ultimately challenges researchers to turn attention to products for “a written text, too, can be a compelling model of the “composing process” once we conceive of a writer as at work within a text and simultaneously, then, within a society, a history, and a culture” (97).